Home or Stalag?
Life cannot always be all sweetness and light. If it were, there would be no need for a Protectory. One likes to believe that most of the boys who lived at the Protectory understood that life there was better than any alternative open to them - but for some of the boys, life there was never going to be as they wanted.
The facility had only been open for a matter of months when four youngsters ran away, allegedly because they had been cruelly forced to work long hours. They also claimed to have been jailed in a communal cell with "tramps," after seeking refuge at a church. Their allegations were published - and then shown to be lies. Three of the boys were too young to be assigned work at the farm, and admitted they had lied. The fourth had run away before, and been returned, but also had not been assigned any work. The four had been confined in a clean room, not a cell, by themselves while they awaited transportation back to the Protectory. The newspaper printed the correct account once it was known.
How one felt about residing at the Protectory likely depended on why one was there. For example, the two teens who were sent there for stealing 50 pounds of lead pipe probably regarded it as a prison. The impoverished woman who was willing to pay the very significant sum of $10 to someone who promised to get her son (already convicted of grand larceny) into the Protectory (by having him commit a petty crime!) probably saw the home as his last chance to learn how to live honestly.
The public may have been made hyper-aware of such cases. The police certainly were. In one case, the press was informed that police records showed a young man recently arrested for burglary had previously "spent a term in the Catholic Protectory," and was still "on parole." One imagines that honest graduates who were making their way through life sometimes encountered the stigma generated by mistaken understandings of the Protectory.
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